Composed in honour of the sixty-fifth birthday of Lloyd Shapley, this volume makes accessible the large body of work that has grown out of Shapley's seminal 1953 paper. Each of the twenty essays concerns some aspect of the Shapley value. Three of the chapters are reprints of the 'ancestral' papers: Chapter 2 is Shapley's original 1953 paper defining the value; Chapter 3 is the 1954 paper by Shapley and Shubik applying the value to voting models; and chapter 19 is Shapley's 1969 paper defining a value for games without transferable utility. The other seventeen chapters were contributed especially for this volume. The first chapter introduces the subject and the other essays in the volume, and contains a brief account of a few of Shapley's other major contributions to game theory. The other chapters cover the reformulations, interpretations and generalizations that have been inspired by the Shapley value, and its applications to the study of coalition formulation, to the organization of large markets, to problems of cost allocation, and to the study of games in which utility is not transferable.

亿万人在万维网上的各种活动，尽管是随机发生、随意展开、无人协调，但显现出了一些有趣的特征与明显的模式：从网络信息的结构，到网民冲浪的行为；从网络拥塞的现象，到电子商务的市场；从信息下载的策略。到社会网络的作用。等等。本书不仅以一种引人入的方式描述了那些模式。而且还令人信服地阐述了形成它们的机理；并且还深入浅出地介绍了获得那些机理的方法。本书所讨论的内容是学术性的，但展开的方式是通俗易懂的。本书的读者对象为—般知识分子，不仅受过科学技术训练的人员可以一口气将它读完，而且有一定自然科学知识背景的社会科学工作者也能轻松地欣赏到它的精彩。

本书的主旨在于讨论作为现代生活中一个经济因素的有闲阶级的地位和价值，但是要把讨论严格地限制在这样标明的范围以内是办不到的。因此关于制度的起源和演进以及一般不列入经济学范围以内的一些社会生活特征，这里也不得不给以相当的注意。